Airplanes, cats, guns, war, the more than occasional rant about the kleptocracy of President Spanky and his party of treason, the spinelessness of the Democraps and ramblings about anything else that flits through the somewhat offbeat mind of an armed lesbian pinko as she slides down the Razor Blade of Life.Caveat lector.

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

The target looks huge, until you consider that it is a fifty yard target. You shoot a Bullseye match one-handed. At that distance, the 8" bullseye of the target looks about the size of an aspirin tablet. Every slight twitch of the trigger causes the sights to wobble.

At fifty yards, you have ten minutes to get off ten shots. You do that three times. Then you set up 25 yard targets with 5.5" bullseyes. You shoot five shots in 20 seconds, reload, and shoot five more shots. Do that three times. Then you shoot five shots in ten seconds, reload, and shoot five more shots. Do that two more times.

By the end of the match, you've fired 90 rounds. A perfect score would be 900.

Of a dozen shooters, I came in third. I need to do some trigger work to bring the weight of the trigger pull down. I'll probably buy and install a Volquartsen trigger and sear before the next match.

For a full "2700" match, you shoot 90 shots with a .22 rimfire target pistol, 90 shots with a centerfire pistol and 90 with a .45 pistol. A perfect score would be 2700, which nobody has ever attained.

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I was at a LGS the other day, listening to a guy tell the owner that he had been an early purchaser of a Remington R51. He said that the cocking serrations on the slide were so sharp that he cut his fingers on them. The rear sight fell out of the dovetail. The gun was so buggy that he sent it back to Remington for repairs. They just cut him a check for the full purchase price, including sales tax.

Remington, by all accounts outsourced the R51 to Para Ordnance. Whether the design was flawed or whether the factory either had no functioning QC department or an incompetent one is an open question. I'd sure as hell be leery to buy anything made by Para Ordnance at this point.

Remington's website doesn't catalog the R51. If you're into long-term investing and you can find a new one in the stores, you might want to buy it and just leave it in the box. It will probably be worth some serious coin in 20-30 years or so.

Somebody once called YouTube "a reservoir of human stupidity". Over at The Firearms Blog, they've been covering a certain form of stupidity: The Tannerite Arms Race.

Tannerite is a low-grade explosive that requires a lot of shock to set off. People have been buying it to make small exploding targets- hit the target with a rifle and it goes boom.

Well, a certain batch of tools have been mixing up large amounts of Tannerite and then setting it off. One clown blew his old barn with over 150 pounds of the stuff. Some other clowns set twice that amount next to some trees.

As for the first clown, guess nobody told him that there are companies that will happily come out disassemble your old barn, and take it away at no cost to you (and some might even pay you). Because they can sell the wood for making furniture and flooring for hipsters. If the barn had a lot of chestnut wood, you might get a decent check for it. but that's neither here nor there.

What's going to happen, of course, is that the possession and use of Tannerite will end up requiring the same sort of licenses that are required to buy and use dynamite. Because of morons like these. (Yes, folks, there was a time when you would have walked into a rural hardware store and bought a case of dynamite.)

About the only amendment of the Bill of Rights that the courts haven't gotten around to gutting yet is the Third Amendment. But if the cops wanted to set up shop in your house, the court'd go along with it, you bet.

It was a nice Constitution while we were using it. The government, now, just pretty much treats it, in the words of George W. Bush, as "a goddamned piece of paper." Just like the Soviet Union did.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

The book is 120 years old, which is why it's available from Project Gutenberg. It is about lynch law.

If you like to think of this nation as an honorable place, it will rock your perceptions. Even if you think you know about lynchings and massacres by white mobs, this book will stun you with the breadth and depravity of the practice.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

The Beer Mile is this: Chug a 12oz can of beer and run a quarter-mile lap, chug a second can of beer, run a quarter mile, and do that until you've run a mile (and chugged four beers). Yes, there are official rules.

There are a lot of potential good things about this, especially if going driverless is an option on a car. Had too much to drink, then just tell the car where to go, hop in the back seat and pass out while the car takes you home.

They had primitive versions of such things over a century ago, but they were called "horses and buggies". If you got potted in the saloon, you just unhitched your buggy, pointed it in the right direction and told the horse to go.

Of course, all of these driverless cars are going to talk to each other, so they can more seamlessly integrate themselves into the traffic flow. And sooner or later, it will be illegal to drive on some roads or in cities without the car being in autonomous mode. Which might improve capacities, as there is no reason why the computers couldn't drive the cars at 90 MPH and at an interval distance of inches.

But still, I think this new future as envisioned by Google is going to have a degree of suckiness. Especially since it's a dead-nuts certainty that a database of who drove where at what time will inevitably be created and maintained by one or more law enforcement agencies.

Maybe the Santa Barbara Asswipe's family could have had him committed. They might have had the money for a private psychiatric hospital, if there was a bed available. But Asswipe was of full legal age and if he didn't want to be treated, there was probably no good way of forcing him. They would have had to hire a lawyer and file a petition for an involuntary commitment. Asswipe would have gotten his own lawyer (or had one appointed) to fight it. And unless it could clearly be shown that he was a danger to himself or the community, good luck with that.

A lot of the old hospitals were not places for healing. But they were places that housed people who were mentally ill. Now, we don't even do that. Those who are mentally ill end up in jail, on the streets, or if they are very lucky, they have families that can afford to care for them for their lifetimes. Some other lucky few may have a disability pension that will be enough to house them in a residential care facility, but a lot of those are more like the hospitals of old: Warehouses, only lots smaller.

None of this is news. Where we are now was probably not hard to forecast three or even four decades ago. The mental health treatment catastrofuck has been a very slow motion trainwreck, one that the politicians all ignored because there was no way to avoid it that did not involve spending public funds. And since one of the two main political parties has an unspoken position of "you should only die soon" towards the mentally ill (and the other party's position is essentially that of cowardice), we got the mental health system that we deserved.

Which is to say: Nothing at all.

So we'll just muddle on. Because there is no political will to fix this problem. Because there are the wingnut megaphone artists who would scream about coddling and shit if we tried. Serious (and lengthy) articles will be written by reporters and printed in various newspapers, and maybe one of them will get a Pulitzer Prize or something. But at the end of the day, we will be right where we are now.

In another year or two or three, another crazy young white dude will grab some guns or knives and go people-hunting. Afterwards, there will be stories in the papers of how disturbed that Jackhole of the Future was and how could it be that nobody could see the signs. There will be the mandatory hand-wringing by politicians and the press proclaiming that this time, something must be done to provide help to the mentally afflicted, at least those who are homicidally inclined. Once the story fades from the news cycles, not a damn thing will have been done. Not a single treatment center will have been funded, let alone built, anywhere in this country.

Rant the First: Do not go up to a veteran today and thank him or her for serving because it's Memorial Day. Memorial Day is a lineal descendant of Decoration Day, which began as a day to honor those who had died serving in the Grand Army of the Republic, a/k/a the Union Army. Memorial Day is for honoring the dead. Veterans Day for honoring the living as well.

Thanking a veteran on Memorial Day could be construed as saying "you should only die soon."

But we, as a nation, moved Veterans' Day back to the anniversary of the World War I Armistice. This is supposed to be the day to honor those who have served and who had their lives ripped away from them.

It's not supposed to be a day to get a jump-start on the summer or the day to get twenty percent off on cheap-jack Chinese shit. That's just ignoble capitalistic debasement of a once-noble holiday.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

You might be aware that Asswipe knifed three people to death before he got into his Daddy-provided Beemer and went hunting other humans. He ran down at least two bicyclists with his car.

But oh, if you read the gun-control loving blogs, none of this would have apparently happened if Asswipe didn't buy a gun. Which assumes facts not in evidence, of course.

Some of them are currently somewhat distracted by Asswipe's participation in the "men's rights movement", but don't worry: They'll circle back to the idea that This Harmless Snowflake Would Have Done Nothing Without a Gun, soon enough.

Basically, the "fusion centers" are looking for dissenters, but only dissenters from the Left. You want to go out and slaughter people because of religious or ethnic hatred, expect them to ignore you. You want to protest fracking or pollution, they'll pay attention to you. Protest the military and they'll infiltrate your group.

The fusion centers do nothing productive. It is high time to defund them.

Please, everyone: Stop referring to these shitbirds by their real names. Deny them the fame that they seek. I've saidthistime and time again, and I'm going to keep at it.

This one, for example, shall be referred to on this blog as the Santa Barbara Asswipe.

Beyond that, Asswipe apparently went on a homicidal rampage because he couldn't get laid. Back in the day, the cure for that malady was a few copies of some soft porn mags and masturbation. But no, guess that didn't occur to Asswipe.

Update: Asswipe's family supports gun control. Because then, Asswipe would have only killed three people (the ones he knifed to death), plus whoever he had managed to run over with his Beemer.

So the FISA court will continue as it always has: Only the government gets to state its case.

Courts are a forum for an adversarial process. If only one side gets to put on a case, then it's more a form of legalistic masturbation. The FISA Court has a long record of being a rubber stamp, approving virtually every surveillance request the government has made since the Court was formed. They've approved something over 30,000 such requests and disapproved maybe a dozen. And no, that's not hyperbole. Over a 12 year period, they've never not approved a pen register request.

Without a "freedom for spying" advocate, then nothing from the FISA Court would ever be reviewed on appeal, because there is nobody to file an appeal. So the FISA Court gets to continue on, thinking they're doing something meaningful. When all they are doing is spreading a judicial fig-leaf over a deeply unconstitutional process.

"On this Memorial Day weekend eve, we can finally admit that America has had, for over two hundred years, a great bipartisan tradition of honoring those who have fought for our freedom by fucking them over once they give their guns back."-- Jon Stewart, in the segment titled World of Warriorshaft, "terrible memory lane".

But thanks to Johnny Roberts and the Supremes, this is where we are. Steyer pours in millions for his cause, as does Mayor "Nanny" Bloomberg, both Koch brothers, and others, such as Sheldon Adleman, Ken Langone, Rex Sinquefield, George Soros, and the list goes on. Politicians answer those guys' calls, because like in the 1960s, when bags of cash were delivered to national political campaigns, money is speech.

We still have a say, but they only listen to us every election cycle. For example, Adleman spent many tens of millions trying to persuade Republican primary voters that Newt Gingrich should be the GOP's man in `12. But Adleman is so rich that fifty million to him is like a hundred bucks (or less) to most people. Linda McMahon spent about $100 million in two elections in failed attempts to buy win a Senate seat in Connecticut (to be fair, self-funding campaigns has always been legal).

The rest of the time, they don't seem to much care what we have to say. Not unless they know, for a certainty, that we'll reliably go to the voting booth and vote on that issue.

Maybe it's sort of always been that way. Now, it's become rather blatant. About the only thing that's still illegal is naked vote-buying, where money is given specifically for a certain vote on a bill. But the difference between saying "I'll give you $$$$$ if you vote for/against this bill" and "I'm giving you $$$$$ and I really support/oppose this issue" would seem to be just quibbling.

Yeah, sure, Bateman is a jagoff who is pretty much an opponent of civilians owning guns, but still: He's bleating this as a win for the Forces of Bloomberg. When what it really is, of course, is a fucking self-inflicted wound by our own side.

Because it seems to me that all of the coroner's findings of "excited delirium" involve people who have been arrested. Some dude doesn't croak in his living room and there's an autposy finding of "excited delirium".

No, this "syndrome" only seems to happen to people in police custody.

Now I know that correlation does not mean causality. But isn't it high time that this "syndrome" received some serious and appropriately skeptical research?

Morons. What ever convinced your little pea-brains that walking into businesses with slung rifles and shotguns was ever a good idea? What sort of twisted logic leads you to conclude that you're helping advance the cause of gun rights?

You're not helping us. You're not promoting the Second Amendment. No, you're acting like a bunch of children who don't understand social mores or civilized behavior.

Being "civilized" is refraining from behavior that is boorish or scares the children and the horses. Things such as men wearing hats (including baseball caps) indoors. Being a loudmouthed jerk in public. Wearing crocsin public. Assholeparkers. And openly carrying weapons in towns.

Didn't your mother ever teach you this lesson: "Just because you can, son, doesn't mean that you should."

How the fuck are you "helping" the cause of gun-owners' rights, guys?

This is how we get oodles of laws, from it being illegal to park in front of fire hydrants to having to tell the NSA and the FBI "Thou Shalt Not Spy on Americans". Because things that should be self-evident to a rational adult need to be spelled out for the idiots who cannot seem to conform their behavior to life in a civilized society.

Please, I beg of you: Leave your fucking ARs either at home or in your trucks. Do try to keep your heaters out of sight. There is no point in frightening those who are unfamiliar with firearms.

Chump change for them. They can shake more than that out of their sofas in Geneva. The DOJ didn't force the bank to hand over its client list. The DOJ didn't have their banking license revoked. Nobody lost their job. Nobody went to jail.

In other words, the DOJ showed up and said, in essence: "Nice little banking operation yo have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it."

You can tell how hard the bank was hit by this, because the article mentioned that their stock price went up.

After the S&L crisis, Reagan's DOJ got convictions and sent people to jail. Obama's DOJ just extorts money. Ol' Barry's lesson to the banksters is "if you steal, we'll make you pay a bullshit fine."

I don't want to hammer Lofgren too hard, as she has been one of the ones fighting to rein in the NSA. But the NSA won't really be reined in and the statists/cowards (Like Rep. Rogers and Sen. Feinstein) are fighting hard on behalf of the NSA.

Still, Lofgren's opening assumption is flawed. The NSA has not been abiding by the law. The NSA's spooks violate the law on a daily basis. And remember, those are just the times that the NSA decided to toss some flunky under the bus. Does anyone really not believe that the NSA has been running intel watches on prominent legislators and reporters?

I'm going to leave Firefox 28 on this desktop computer open until either they fix it or those fucksticks at Redmond send an update that requires a restart. FF-28 is so much more user-friendly. The clowns who changed the interface for FF-29 should be staked out for the coyotes to eat.

In the search for a bank robber, the Aurora cops rounded up everybody that they could get their hands on. The cops had a description of the robber as a while male, 20s-30s, 130lbs. So they grabbed everybody: Men, women, children. The cops forced them out of their cars and handcuffed them, keeping everyone sitting on a curb for two hours. The cops searched everyone's car, just in case the bank robber was hiding in the spare tire well. Oh, the goons said they got consents for most searches, but can a person who is in handcuffs and who is told they'll be arrested if they don't consent truly be said to have voluntarily submitted?

I don't think so.

How much longer does this shit have to go on before everyone gets the idea that the cops have long ago abandoned "to protect and to serve" and now are operating in "to suppress and repress" mode?

Which, of course, is bullshit. The NSA was listening in to telephone calls between reporters and their editors. They were not only listening into calls between our soldiers and their loved one, they were passing around the racy bits for their buddies to chuckle over.

So the cycle will repeat itself. The NSA and the other TLAs will develop work-arounds so they can get whatever shit they want without having to follow inconvenient laws and procedures. The pro-statists like Sen. Feinstein and Rep. Rogers will pat each other on the back, knowing that they were able to dodge anything approaching real reform.

And the terms "online" and "privacy" will forever be mutually incompatible.

Sunday, May 18, 2014

I ended up sleeping in today, then went flying. The annual inspection for the airplane begins this week. Hopefully, it won't be too bad, because I'm having the windshields replaced. The left-hand one is 26 years old, the right-hand one is at least ten years older.

After flying, I went to the grocery store. It was already late for lunch, so I tossed in a package of frozen breen and nuked that.

I guess we'll have to wait for the guilty plea to find out what that moron thought it was a good idea to sneak into a nursing home to take photos of an advanced Alzheimer's patient.

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Meanwhile, the cops in Philadelphia have been robbing bodegas. The badged-up crooks' MO is this: They get a search warrant from a brain-dead judge by alleging that the store is selling "drug paraphernalia"-- that being the same ziploc bags that are sold in every freaking grocery store in the country. The thieves show up, present the warrant, smash all of the security cameras, arrest the store owners and then help themselves to cartons of cigarettes, cash, cell phones and whatever else strikes their fancy.

A logical conclusion might be that somebody in the U.s. Attorney's office is eying a run for political office and doesn't want to get on the bad side of the criminals' policemen's union. Or the cops had hushed up some FBI fuckery and this is a returned favor.

Firefox 29 changed the look of the tabs to make the tabs that are not open almost unreadable.

This is now what it looks like:

The tabs used to be all white. But the geniuses at Firefox apparently concluded that was too distracting, so they made them so that the text font is the same color as the tab itself. Sure, the text color is a skosh darker. But barely that.

I use a laptop. But I plunk it on the coffee table and I use a regular keyboard on my lap itself. Lots more comfortable. But at the distance of three feet, I can't read the background tabs.

This is an improvement? This is the sort of silly shit I'd expect from those arrogant assholes in Redmond. If they don't fix this one, I'm going to have to jump to Chrome for the time being.

The original Eclipse company crateredyears ago. It was probably the biggest financial failure in general aviation history. Over a billion dollars were lost.

Eclipse promised a jet at a fly-away cost of $775,000, a number that rational observers thought was ludicrous. But just like the firearms rags, the aviation press functions more as a cheering section for the industry, not as critical observers (with the exception of Flying in this instance, which never bought into the hype about Eclipse). People who should have known better ponied up deposits that began at $80,000 and then went much higher. The initial delivery price was closer to twice the advertised price and even at that, Eclipse lost hundreds of thousands of dollars per airplane and delivered airplanes that were barely complete enough to be flyable. There were stories that Eclipse was delivering jets with VOR-only installed radios, along with a handheld GPS.

The cratering was inevitable, really. Lots of people lost their six-figure deposits, as Eclipse had kept going back to the delivery position holders and gotten more money from them. New Mexico had coughed up something like $20-25 million in incentives to get Eclipse to build its factory in Albuquerque.

The new company says its delivering Eclipse 550s. Apparently, as far as the FAA is concerned, they're still 500s. The price is within spitting distance of $3 million. Which isn't that far off the price of a Cessna Citation 510, which was Cessna's small jet model, and which was always priced in the multi-million dollar range.

But then again, Cessna knows something about making smaller jets. They've been building jets for about 45 years or so and airplanes for eighty years. Yet even they have their clunkersfromtime to time.

Because keeping income taxes the same on the rich and using the money for the common good is evil. But increasing taxes on the poor, the working poor and the shrinking middle class and using that money for the common good is righteous.

if there is a better example than this one recently which highlights the civic small-mindedness and selfishness of the rich, then I don't know of it.

Emperor Napoleon was very happy to sell the Louisiana territory to the Americans. He likely knew that France had no ability to defend the territory. Better to get 60 million francs for it, rather than lose it by conquest.

The funny thing is that the bonds for the purchase were underwritten, in part, by a London bank and Napoleon used the money to build up French military forces for war with England. (Then, as now, banksters were little more than amoral sociopaths.)

The good thing is that the French and the British had been enemies for centuries. If they hadn't been and if France had sold the Territory to the British, America today would likely be a much smaller and far less influential nation and Canada would have been a world power, eh?

But cuts have to be made somewhere, so if the big boys manage to buy the congressmen they need to protect their projects, then the cuts will go more towards traditional moves which hollow-out the armed forces: Cuts to pay and benefits, cuts to readiness and training, cuts to recruiting.

But oh, you know that LockMart and their ilk won't be bothered if their products go either straight to the boneyard or just sit at the bases, slowly corroding away. Because they'll have already made their money.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Monday, May 12, 2014

This was a moving target drill, start shooting when the target begins moving towards you.

Turns out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be. I shot it both with a Colt Detective Special and a Taurus 605 with laser grips. The laser helped for the first shot, but after that, I was relying on the sights. There was one one clean miss, which didn't show on the photo.

But we all know what is really going on here: The CIA is hoping that everybody will forget about it. They're hoping that the pro-torture party will win control of the Senate and scuttle the report. So if those skeevy fuckers can drag it out into next year, they think they'll be able to hide everything.

Here's the thing: They won't.

We all know what the CIA tortured people.

We all know that the Bush Administration wholeheartedly authorized the use of torture.

We all know that the Bush Administration found lawyers who said that torture was just peachy.

We all know that there were doctors and psychologists who directly supervised, if not participated in torturing people.

We know all of this. What matters is whether or not we, as a nation, are going to admit to our own crimes against humanity and hold the perpetrators accountable.

I'm betting on "No". Because the Senate and this Administration are just loaded with "good little Americans", who are more than willing to walk past the torture chambers whilst whistling a happy tune.

All of my life, I've had contempt for the German citizens who pretended that the horrors of the Nazi regime were things that they didn't see at the time. But it's pretty hard for me to keep that attitude when the same attitude is so prevalent, now, and in this country.

And for those who are going to complain of Godwin's Law, I offer this old joke:

An old man is seated next to a young, attractive woman at a dinner party. The man says. "As you know, I'm very wealthy, and I was wondering if you would sleep with me for a million dollars."

"Well," says the woman, "I suppose I would."

The old man smiles. "Would you sleep with me for ten dollars?"

The woman is aghast. "Of course not! What kind of woman do you think I am?"

"We've established that," the man says. "Now we're bargaining over the price."

I've read a couple of science articles about supersymmetry ("SUSY") and I am pretty baffled. SUSY seems to have something to do with a relationship between the subatomic particles that can be observed using very powerful particle accelerators and their "superpartners", which the theorists think exist but haven't been found. They're planning to crank the Large Hadron Collider up to full power by 2015 to look for the superpartners.

The thing is that if no proof for SUSY is found, then physicists will wander off and develop other hypotheses for how the Universe holds together.

Which highlights the difference between religion and science, in that in science, when the facts contradict the ideas, the ideas are rethought. In religion, the facts are denied.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

You know, the thing that the DMV does to take most license photos? The thing that has to be done for a passport photo? The thing that wedding photographers have used for generations to shoot bridal photos? Putting the subject in front of a white background and taking the picture? Yes, that.

Amazon has turned itself into the World's Largest Patent Troll.

I think I'm going to patent aerobic respiration. I'll let you know to where you, your animals, and your plants need to send the royalty checks.

I'm skeptical of the utility of the F-35. But then again, I'm not convinced of Ft. Fumble's ability to buy anything more complicated than a bolt-action rifle without screwing it all up. The F-35 has been tasked with doing everything from ACM to ground-attack, which is a pretty good guarantee that it won't be able to do much of anything well.

The excuse is that the bar cars can't be coupled to the new MU cars that Metro-North is buying. While Metro-North says that they'll "look into" re-introducing bar cars on their new trains, we all know that horseshit. They're gone for good.

But it's more than that. American military strategy in the 20th Century was, at its core, pretty basic. The US would let the Europeans kill each other while American companies would make weapons that the US would sell (or lend) to the favored side. Remember that the premier American pursuit aircraft of World War Two was initially designed and built to meet a British RFP. The rifle that the vast majority of Doughboys carried in World War One was first built for the British Army and then rechambered for the American cartridge.

The strategy of allowing the Europeans to bleed each other out before the Americans would intervene in force also allowed to the mobilization and equipping of a large American army consisting mostly of draftees. This avoided the cost of having to maintain a significant standing army, but enabled the fielding of millions of soldiers. But it required an industrial base capable of rapidly equipping such an army.

That industrial base has been hollowed out, both by Pentagon/Government/Administration mismanagement over decades.

This country has apparently lost the ability to simply design, procure and build complex weapon systems.[2]

But it goes deeper than that. Being able to rapidly equip an army required an industrial base that could shift to making military materiel. Any cursory perusal of the industrial history of the Second World War will show that companies that made consumer goods and industrial equipment transitioned to making military goods. Whether car plants or washing machine factories, they made stuff for the armed forces.

Over the last few decades, the bright boys of American industry, the capitalists and the banksters, have been actively engaged in closing American industrial plants and relocating production to nations as close as Mexico and as far as China. Go into any sporting goods shop and you will likely find that for anything other than firearms, everything that you may want to buy was made in a foreign nation.

How secure does this make us? In the First World War, Mexico was wooed by the Germans. In the Second, while the Mexicans declared war on Germany in 1942 after U-boats sank Mexican ships. Their combat contribution was one squadron of US-built P-47s that saw service beginning two months before Japan was nuked.[3]

As for China, well, they have either at times been an active enemy or a serious hindrance. The Chinese have been more-or-less complicit in the nuclearization of North Korea. It is not too big of a stretch to see China as the principal strategic adversary of the West in this Century. And yet, we keep sellingthemourindustrialbase.

Which makes one wonder about the patriotism of the capitalists and the banksters who are complicit in this. Oh, they probably salute the Flag and wear flag pins and other symbolic nonsense, but when it comes down to money, those fuckers would sell their daughters into whorehouses and sell their grandparents' carcasses to rendering plants if they could make a buck on the deal.

Lenin probably really didn't say that "capitalists will sell us the rope that we use to hang them all." But it is nonetheless true.
_____________________________________[1] I kind of hesitate to refer to it as a "warship", as it's pretty much a fast-moving target.
[2] Other than maybe submarines.
[3] Contrast that to the efforts of Brazil, if you like.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

I don't know what the answer is. The folks in the western part of the country were correct in charging that the government of President Viktor Yanukovych was corrupt to the core. The folks in the eastern part of the country are correct when they charge that Yanukovych was the duly elected president and that he was ousted by a coup. The westerners want closer ties with the EU, the easterners want those ties to be with Russia. Both sides include fascist elements.

There may have been a workable solution to all of that. Maybe a form of regional entities with a federal government over them. A lot of countries have such forms of government. They sort of work and they allow regional differences to be taken into account.

Maybe that could have worked in the Ukraine.

But the window for that is closing. Once bullets fly and people die, attitudes harden. The combatants will want to extract a blood price and, like most civil wars, this one will spin out of control and go on until one side wins, both sides are exhausted, or a superior power intervenes and puts down the fighting.

I'd bet on #3.

UPDATED to add: But even if the Russians do intervene to put down the Ukrainian civil war, I would not assume that they'd automatically absorb the eastern regions of Ukraine. For if they do that and leave a truncated state to the immediate west, it's probably a dead-nuts certainty that what remains of Ukraine would clamor for admission to the EU and into NATO. The Russians have rued the admission of the Baltics into NATO, they'd be eight kinds of pissed off if even a portion of the Ukraine joined NATO.

On the other hand, given that, if the Russians do move into Ukraine, they'll probably occupy all of it, for the reason stated in the previous paragraph.

Part of the Snowden Effect. He outed those rat bastards as being little more than a bunch of willing informers. But it seems that people don't care for that very much. As they could have learned from Eastern Europe, nobody likes a stukach.

A few things are dead-nuts certain about this bit of news: First, some pirate (like Rmoney) has figured out already how to make a boatload of money from this. Second, the pirates told the directors that it "be good for the shareholders". Third, most of the smaller shareholders will be screwed over. And fourth, the people who work for Energizer will be fucked over.

Because that's what the capitalist pirates do. The Icahns, the Goldsmiths, the Romneys, they all specialize in getting their hooks into companies, looting them, and then leaving behind a dystopian landscape of shuttered factories, shattered towns and unemployed people.

You can find stories on corruption in the Afghan government going back to the first days after we dropped Our Man Hamid into the job as president in 2001. Afghanistan is tied for the ranking of Most Corrupt Nation on Earth for 2013. In 2007, Afghanistan ranked higher, only the 9th most corrupt nation on the globe.

But now we have a retired (as in "not required to stick to the official talking points") general who is admitting that Afghanistan is corrupt.

Ye Gods, what's next? An admission that one can get wet while standing outside during a rainstorm? What the fuck did he think was going to happen when we were flying in pallets of Benjamins to pay for things? Did anyone not notice the large mansions in Kabul that had been built by civil servants who were officially paid a couple hundred bucks a month? There are news story after news story on Afghan corruption, going back over a decade. If you were to print them all out, the word count would rival a Russian novel.

And all this is news to an Army general and to the dodderheads in the Senate?

The bind moggles. I can't even come close to the level of snark that is called for on this one. This is a job for a professional.

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Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.